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Searching for MODEL’s Ghost Army 4 May 04 A rebel commander of the so-called Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) claimed weeks ago that he has 15,000 men in the forest all over southeast awaiting his command. Now, since the UN began disarming MODEL rebels in the port city of Buchanan, the legions have disappeared. There are only 1300 fighters, 500 of them Ivorians, according to the AFP quoting disarmament officials. Thus we are talking about a much-hailed army of 800. Of the total including the mercenaries, 900 carried weapons, since 400 have turned in weapons. The UN is left with a large party without guests, that is a large cantonment site without fighters. The AFP quotes a representative at the camp in Buchanan as saying: “I guess we will stay here until the last combatants come and wait until they decide to close the camp…We expected 5,000 and based this cantonment site on those estimates… “The arms are not coming, they are going farther into Ivory Coast," said another official.” Most of MODEL came from that side (in Ivory Coast) and now they are going back. Some have arms there already waiting…" What a trick! What a rude joke! A mere 1300 ragtag fighters, half mercenaries, others with sticks, responsible for mortgaging the Foreign Ministry, Maritime, Lands and Mines, the Forestry Development Authority and many more lucrative positions? How come? One must simply concede that the MODEL gang leaders are con artists par excellence. They are on their in making history. But the UN should have been more careful in estimating that this group, accustomed to power with a gun in hand, had 5000 men for a number of reasons. Perhaps they did, but according to residents in Buchanan when MODEL entered the city, most of their fighters were Ivorians. They spoke French, apart from their Guerre (Krahn in Liberia), according to news reports. The count at the camp confirms this because many have since returned home, according to news sources. It was a makeshift project built on the marriage of convenience. MODEL was the last group to jump on the rebel war train and this is because until then, they had no means of launching war. Charles Taylor provided them the ammunition when he attacked Cote d’Ivoire and before that, when he told Laurent Gbagbo that when it comes to guerrilla wars, he (Taylor) was the guru that should be consulted because of his vast experience. Gbagbo did, by arming the men calling themselves MODEL who had been lingering the region searching for weapons they could not find. After all, before Gbagbo’s rise, Cote d’Ívoire was Taylor territory unchallenged. With the late Robert Guei, a (Yakuba, Gio in Liberia), whose kinsmen formed the majority in Taylor’s rebel legions, no one could penetrate Cote d’Ívoire without Taylor’s knowledge and approval. All that changed when Guei lost out and was shot, with the International Crisis Group revealing that Taylor had sent scores of fighters into Cote dÍvoire. Africa Confidential also reported that around Guei were many Liberian fighters of the Gio-Mano ethic groups. Thus when the late Guei boasted that he would have an army at his disposal with a snap of the fingers, he was not counting on Burkina Faso or Ghana. He had Taylor as an ally. With pro-Taylor rebels waging terror in the west of Cote d’Ivoire under various names—Movement for Greater West and the rest—Gbagbo found a formula to answer a friend. He unleashed his ethnic enemies and in a blitzkrieg, accompanied by their Ivorian allies, they reached Buchanan, as Charles Taylor’s child soldiers disappeared. Long before this, there were numerous reports filed by relief agencies, and along with protests by humanitarian agencies, that all sides in the Ivorian conflict were recruiting refugees. These “refugees”, Liberian and Sierra Leonean fighters under Taylor’s command, with the late Sam Bockarie as his Ivorian Field Marshall, helped to push the Greater West rebels away from around the Liberian-Ivorian border. To pay back, and win the final game, the Ivorians escorted their allies into Liberia, just as Charles Taylor escorted Sierra Leone rebels across the border in 1991. . Therefore, that there are not the expected numbers of MODEL Liberian fighters to collect the attractive $300 and live in the cantonment camps is because they have gone back home. Truth is redeeming. The MODEL people have fooled many people who preferred to be fooled, and they are laughing and dancing to their banks, paying their moorages, with only a 1300-man ragtag army as investment. They will live to tell the story.
--Tom
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